Wallace attended the Hotchkiss School and Harvard College. He first reported news on-air for WHRB, the student radio station at Harvard. He memorably covered the 1969 student occupation of University Hall and was detained by Cambridge police, using his one phone call to sign off a report from Cambridge City Jail with "This is Chris Wallace in custody."[11]

Although accepted at Yale Law School, Wallace instead took a job with The Boston Globe.[12] He says he realized he wanted to move to television when he noticed all the reporters at the 1972 political conventions were watching the proceedings on TV instead of in person. For a time in the early 1970s, he worked for the Chicago station WBBM-TV, which was owned and operated by CBS.[13]

Wallace began his network journalism career with NBC in 1975, where he stayed for 14 years, as a reporter with WNBC-TV in New York City. Wallace then transferred to NBC's Washington bureau as a political correspondent for NBC News and later served as Washington co-anchor and news reader for the Today show in 1982. He also served as chief White House correspondent (1982–1989), anchor of the Sunday edition of NBC Nightly News (1982–1984, 1986–1987), and moderator of Meet the Press (1987–1988).

Some journalists have described Wallace's style as confrontational. During President Ronald Reagan's news conference in March 1987, when Reagan admitted to dealing arms for hostages, Wallace asked Reagan why he had denied that Israel was involved with the arms sales to Iran "when you knew that wasn't true."[14]

Wallace left NBC in 1989 for ABC. At ABC News, Wallace was the senior correspondent for Primetime Thursday and occasionally hosted Nightline. During the first Gulf War in 1991, he reported from Tel Aviv on the IraqiScud missiles attacks. At the time, the Israeli government did not want to advertise where the Scuds landed, to prevent the Iraqis from making adjustments to their launchers. On one episode of Nightline, Wallace started describing the location in Tel Aviv where a Scud missile landed. Host Ted Koppel cut him off and asked him to point to a general area rather than give a specific location.[15]

He has remarked in the past that his work at Fox opened his eyes to what critics cite as bias in the mainstream press. Wallace has stated, "Fox News wouldn't exist if it weren't for this kind of stuff going on in the mainstream media. That's why people are fed up with that and want the antidote to it because they get it and they've gotten it for years – the so-called bias in the objective press."[16]

The Commission on Presidential Debates selected Chris Wallace as moderator of the third presidential debate, held on October 19, 2016, at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. This was the first time a Fox News anchor had moderated a general election presidential debate.[17] After he was selected, Wallace controversially said, "it's not my job" to fact-check candidates, but that it was the job of the opposing candidate.[18] But after the debate, Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post said that despite her strong disapproval of other Fox News commentators, "No one could watch the final debate and deny that Chris Wallace is among the best in the business."[19]

In July 2018, Wallace conducted a tough interview with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Wallace questioned Putin about why so many of his political opponents end up dead and, in a notable exchange, sought to hand Putin papers containing the indictment of 12 Russian agents for interference in the 2016 election (Putin refused to touch the papers).[20][21] According to The Washington Post's Aaron Blake, Putin was "clearly frustrated by a journalist actually challenging him".[20]

Wallace has said that despite his blood relationship with his father, Mike, his stepfather, Bill Leonard, had far more of an impact on his life. Wallace said that Leonard was "the single most important person in my life."[25] Wallace first developed a relationship with his father in his teens, after his older brother Peter died in 1962 climbing a mountain in Greece.[26]

Wallace has been married twice. In 1973, he married Elizabeth Farrell, with whom he has four children: Peter,[27] Megan, Andrew, and Catherine.[28] In 1997, he married Lorraine Smothers (née Martin, born 1959), the former wife of Dick Smothers.[29] Lorraine has two children from her previous marriage: Sarah Smothers and Remick Smothers.[30][31]

On October 11, 2006, The Washington Post reported that Wallace had been a registered Democrat for more than two decades. Wallace explained his party affiliation as pragmatism, saying that being a Democrat is the only feasible means of participating in the political process in heavily Democratic Washington, DC. He maintained that he had voted for candidates from both major parties in the past.[32]